President Trump, Please Staple (Conditional) Green Cards to Graduate Degrees

The following article was authored by our former colleague, Yuri Mamchur, who served as the Senior Foreign Policy Fellow at Discovery Institute.

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In June 2024, presidential candidate Donald J. Trump said: “You graduate from a college, I think you should get, automatically as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country. That includes junior colleges, too.”

Trump’s comments, which were an entry in the ongoing and recently intensified debate on the right about immigration, tapped into a truth. Our immigration system has welcomed gang members and awarded them housing and health care. And yet it forces some of the brightest minds that our schools and scholarships have nurtured to jump through numerous hoops before they can stay and work in the country — and sometimes, it just deports them.

I am a German-born, Russian-speaking naturalized U.S. citizen with two Vanderbilt graduate degrees, state and federal bar admissions, and national security clearance. However, it took me $100,000 and 13 years (from 1999 to 2012) to obtain a green card. I finally became an American in 2019.

In 2008, at a routine renewal appointment for my H-1B (temporary, specialized worker) visa, I encountered an angry interview officer who was evidently having a bad day. Were it not for my work endorsements by leading members of Congress, my American journey would have ended right there, perhaps because this gentleman spilled coffee on his favorite shirt or argued with his wife that morning.

My immigration experience shaved ten years off my professional, personal, and perhaps even biological life. It robbed me of many opportunities to advance my financial standing and start contributing meaningfully to America’s economy and security sooner.

Trump is right: It is short-sighted to grant merit-based scholarships but deny merit-based visas. But my opinion on what exactly should be done differs somewhat from the president’s — which, when Trump expressed it last June, was most likely a policy principle rather than a policy proposal.

Here’s what I suggest. First, let’s restrict this policy to graduate schools and avoid the risk of turning state colleges without proper vetting resources into spy-visa mills. Second, the awarding of green cards should still require federal background checks.

In the 2023-24 academic year, half of 1,126,690 international students in the U.S. attended graduate schools. Of these, 25 percent studied math and computer science, 19 percent studied engineering, and 14 percent studied business and management. About one-third of international graduate students receive American scholarships. In light of this, anti-H-1B advocates inadvertently may have a point: H-1B visas force companies to search broadly for international candidates while ignoring intellectual assets already at home. The annual cap of 85,000 H-1B visas yields an infuriating and uncertain process for employers and candidates alike. America already sponsors foreign students to study here — why does it then send them away to compete with us from overseas?

While I earned my U.S. law degree, the majority of international students in my class were Chinese. They seemed to have a particular interest in intellectual property. The Chinese pilfering of American IP, a long-time problem, culminated in July 2020, when U.S. officials accused China’s Houston consulate of being a center of espionage and IP theft, and then padlocked the outpost.

It’s not just China. Vladimir Putin has survived Western economic sanctions in party by relying on the expertise of U.S.-educated Russians who wound up back home, often thanks to uncertain immigration pathways and frustrated job prospects in America.

We teach our adversaries how to beat us at our own game. This is especially true concerning such hardheaded academic disciplines as engineering and computer science.

Basic background checks long have been required for international students aspiring to attend U.S. colleges. After completing one- to three-year programs on F-1 visas, graduates can apply for optional practical training (OPT), which grants them twelve months to work in the U.S. However, this policy is detached from employers’ interests. Why would a company hire and train a highly paid and skilled individual knowing that it must dismiss him or her after one year? Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduates may seek a 24-month extension beyond the original twelve as part of the OPT program, increasing their employability for up to 36 months. However, this extension might be denied. In those cases, employers must have trained their future industrial rivals.

I witnessed this ill-conceived policy in action. A foreign acquaintance — let’s call him Vitaliy — earned a master’s degree in economics and an MBA from a top American university. The sands in his OPT hourglass began falling immediately upon graduation. After six months, Halliburton’s Houston headquarters, appreciating Vitaliy’s knowledge of the oil industry, offered him a job. Half of Vitaliy’s OPT period had already elapsed, so he applied for an H-1B visa. Unfortunately, the OPT sands ran out before his H-1B was approved. So, Vitaliy obeyed America’s immigration laws: He sold his car, gave away his belongings, broke his lease, and immediately flew to Russia. Two months later, Vitaliy scored a petroleum-sector job in Siberia. He then spent a decade deploying his American-earned skills to build Russia’s economy and compete against the U.S. oil industry.

Back to Trump’s suggestion: Why not issue foreign graduates conditional green cards right away and use the first twelve months (what would have otherwise been the graduates’ OPT year) for in-depth federal background checks? This would be sufficient to identify foreign spies and sleeper agents, which would strongly discourage them from applying to school in the U.S. in the first place. Furthermore, to reinforce this policy, any student or graduate discovered to be a spy or unregistered foreign agent should lose his degree and be deported.

Today, approximately 70-80 percent of foreign graduates with master’s degrees and Ph.D.s in STEM fields apply for H-1B visas. Out of the 85,000 H-1B visas annually, only 20,000 are reserved for applicants with U.S. master’s degrees or higher; none are allocated to non-STEM graduates specifically, such as those who earn MBAs, LLMs, and JDs. Yes, let’s retain math whizzes with advanced degrees in physics, but why not also retain freshly minted entrepreneurs and IP attorneys? Our current system trains the best business and legal minds from overseas and then ships them out of the U.S. soon after they’ve vacated their dormitories.

Imagine if half of the 500,000 international graduate students in the U.S. annually wished to stay. Welcoming 250,000 highly educated professionals, who have assimilated into our culture, would make the H-1B debate obsolete and would not subtract from our society. Instead, this policy would help make America great again.